Let’s Talk About Yevgeny Prigozhin…

By Michael Snyder

Source: End of the American Dream

When Yevgeny Prigozhin launched his short-lived rebellion, many in the western media were describing it as a “coup”.  But the truth is that Prigozhin did not intend to try to overthrow Vladimir Putin.  He just wanted his seat at the table back.  Being in Vladimir Putin’s good graces had turned Prigozhin into an exceedingly wealthy man over the years, but now everything was changing.  Prigozhin was in danger of losing everything that he had worked to build, and the final straw was a decision to break up the Wagner Group and absorb those troops into the Russian military.  Prigozhin realized that he was being sidelined, and so in a desperate attempt to get some leverage he hatched an ill-fated plan to kidnap Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and General Valery Gerasimov.  Unfortunately for Prigozhin, they learned of his scheme in advance, and their travel plans were changed.  When he realized that his scheme had failed, Prigozhin was willing to make a deal, because ultimately he didn’t want to see his fighters slaughtered in a pointless conflict.

Before becoming world famous as the head of the Wagner Group, Yevgeny Prigozhin was making tremendous amounts of money as a caterer.

He had been given extremely lucrative contracts to provide food for the Moscow school system and for Russian military bases, and that gave him a position among Russia’s elite.

Of course running the Wagner Group has been a tremendous source of wealth for Prigozhin as well.  In fact, his two businesses had combined to bring in nearly 2 billion dollars in revenue over the past year…

President Vladimir Putin said Tuesday the finances of Wagner mercenary chief Yevgeny Prigozhin’s catering firm would be investigated after his mutiny, saying Wagner and its founder had received almost $2 billion from Russia in the past year.

Unfortunately for Prigozhin, in recent months he started to fall out of favor.

He had been recruiting fighters for the Wagner Group in prisons all over Russia, but the government put a stop to that.

Now the Russian military is recruiting in those prisons, and that absolutely infuriated Prigozhin.

Another thing that greatly upset Prigozhin was when his good friend General Sergei Surovikin was replaced as the top commander of operations in Ukraine by General Valery Gerasimov.

Prigozhin always had a lot of respect for Surovikin, but he utterly detests Gerasimov.

Since then, tensions between Prigozhin and Russian military brass just continued to rise, and that led to a fateful decision on June 10th.

On that date, it was announced that all soldiers in the Wagner Group would be required to sign a contact with the Russian military by July 1st.

Essentially, the plan was for the Wagner Group to be absorbed and Prigozhin realized that he would be losing his private army.

He appealed to Putin, but Putin sided with the military brass.

That was the final straw for Prigozhin, and so he hatched a plan to kidnap Gerasimov and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu in a desperate attempt to get some leverage on Putin.

But as CNN has explained, news of Prigozhin’s ill-fated plan got out ahead of time…

Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin planned to seize two top Russian military officials when he launched a short-lived mutiny on Saturday, the Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday, citing Western officials.

Prigozhin’s plot involved the capture of Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu and top army general Valery Gerasimov when the pair visited a region along the border of Ukraine, the WSJ wrote.

Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) learned of the plot two days before it was due to take place, forcing Prigozhin to change his plans at the last minute and launch a march towards Moscow instead, according to the report.

Prigozhin quickly realized that he was holding a losing hand, and he clearly understood that if he continued his rebellion he would soon end up dead.

So he made the best deal that he could under the circumstances.

But that certainly isn’t what leaders in the western world were hoping for.  They were hoping that Prigozhin’s rebellion would spark an uprising that would lead to the overthrow of Vladimir Putin.  Of course the truth is that was never what Prigozhin intended

“Prigozhin’s rebellion wasn’t a bid for power or an attempt to overtake the Kremlin,” Tatyana Stanovaya, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center, wrote in an analysis of the events. “It arose from a sense of desperation; Prigozhin was forced out of Ukraine and found himself unable to sustain Wagner the way he did before, while the state machinery was turning against him.”

Most Americans don’t realize this, but Vladimir Putin is far, far more popular inside Russia than Joe Biden is in the United States.

There isn’t going to be any sort of a popular uprising against Putin because most of the population is solidly behind him.

And most Russians are not against the war in Ukraine either.  If anything, most Russians want Putin to take the gloves off and start hitting Ukraine much harder.

But you aren’t going to hear any of this from politicians in the western world.

They are going to use Prigozhin’s rebellion as evidence that what they are doing is working.  In fact, earlier this week Joe Biden boldly declared that Putin “is clearly losing the war in Iraq”.

Yes, he actually said that.

Needless to say, he actually meant that Putin is losing the war in Ukraine.

But that is not actually accurate either.

Over the past several weeks, the Ukrainians have lost hundreds of vehicles and thousands upon thousands of men in a very foolish counter-offensive that has basically accomplished nothing.

The Russians are quite content to fight a war of attrition right now, because they believe that time is on their side.

Sadly, the reality of the matter is that time is running out for all of us.

Both sides just continue to escalate matters, and that will eventually result in the United States and Russia fighting one another directly.

We should be trying to avoid such a scenario at all costs, because such a conflict would almost certainly lead to nuclear war.

Once nukes start flying, millions of people are going to die.

But there are no peace marches in major U.S. cities right now, and that is because the American people simply do not understand what we are facing.

How Did Someone Like Me Get Shadow-Banned?

By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

It seems there are many reasons to get shadow-banned, but unfortunately we’re never told what “crime” we committed nor are we given a chance to defend ourselves from the “indictment” in whatever “court” found us “guilty.” As in a nightmarish tale right out of Kafka, the powers making the charges, declaring the verdict “guilty as charged” and imposing the penalty are completely obscured.

Those found “guilty” discover their secret “conviction” and “sentence” when their livelihood is destroyed (i.e. they’re demonetized) and their online presence suddenly diminishes or vanishes.

I call this being sent to Digital Siberia. As with the real gulag, most of those convicted in the secret digital Star Chamber are innocent of any real crime; their “crime” was challenging the approved narratives.

Which leads to my question: why was little old marginalized-blogger me shadow-banned? Those responsible are under no obligation to reveal my “crime,” the evidence used against me, or offer me an opportunity to defend myself against the charges, much less file an appeal.

My astonishment at being shadow-banned (everyone in Digital Siberia claims to be innocent, heh) is based on my relatively restrained online presence, as I stick to the journalistic standards I learned as a free-lancer for mainstream print media: source data, excerpts and charts from mainstream / institutional sources and raise the questions / build the thesis on those links / data.

I avoid conspiracy-related topics (not my interest, not my expertise) and hot-button ideological / political cleavages (us vs. them is also not my interest). My go-to source for charts and data is the Federal Reserve database (FRED) and government agencies such as the Census Bureau, Bureau of Labor Statistics, IRS, etc., and respected non-governmental organizations (NGOs) such as the Pew Research Center, RAND, investment banks, etc.

Given my adherence to journalistic standards, I wonder: how did someone like me get shadow-banned?

The standard cause (or excuse) for being overtly banned is “distributing misinformation.” This charge is never specific; something you posted “violates our community standards,” or equivalent broad-brush language.

Shadow-banning is even more pernicious because you’re not even notified that your visibility to others has been restricted or dropped to zero. You see your post, but nobody else does.

What are the precise standards for declaring a link or statement as “misinformation?” As the twitter files revealed, what qualifies as “misinformation” is constantly shifting as a sprawling ecosystem of censors share information and blacklists. This report is well worth reading: The Censorship-Industrial Complex: Top 50 Organizations To Know (Zero Hedge).

Not only do we not know what qualifies as “misinformation,” we also don’t know what Big Tech algorithms are flagging and what their response is to whatever’s been flagged. My colleague Nate Hagens, who is equally scrupulous about using authoritative sources, posted this comment last year:

“It’s both funny and scary. It was explained to me today that the new Facebook/Meta algorithm downrates users who have cookies w evidence of visiting non-mainstream news sources/blogs. Even when one uses proxy servers and incognito mode, if you frequent e.g. Aljazeera or other news sites instead of CNN or FOX the algorithms categorizes your FB content (even if it’s a chicken soup recipe) as ‘non-mainstream’.
Big brother is watching (and not even thinking).
Those ideas/voices outside the status quo aren’t on equal footing- and the status quo (material growth/cultural values) is what’s leading us down the current path, without a map or plan.”

The systems that shadow-ban us are completely opaque. Who’s to say that a knowledgeable human reviews who’s been banned or shadow-banned? Given the scale of these Big Tech platforms and Search Engines, is that even possible?

It’s well known that YouTube constantly changes its ranking algorithms so they are harder to game, i.e. manipulate to advance one’s visibility.

It’s also known that simply posting a link to a site flagged as “misinformation” is enough to get your post excommunicated and your site flagged in unknown ways with unknown consequences.

What I do know is that Of Two Minds was publicly identified as “Russian Propaganda” by a bogus organization with no supporting data, PropOrNot in 2016. This front’s blacklist was prominently promoted by the Washington Post on page one in 2016, more or less giving it the authority of a major MSM outlet.

One might ask how a respected, trusted newspaper could publish a list from a shadowy front without specifying the exact links that were identified as “Russian Propaganda.” Standard journalistic protocol requires listing sources, not just publishing unverified blacklists.

Clearly, the Washington Post should have, at a minimum, demanded a list of links from each site on the blacklist that were labeled as “Russian Propaganda” so the Post journalists could check for themselves. At a minimum, the Post should have included inks as examples of “Russian Propaganda” for each site on the list. They did neither, a catastrophic failure of the most fundamental journalistic standards. Yet no one in the media other than those wrongfully blacklisted even noted or questioned this abject failure.

In effect, the real propaganda was the unsourced, un-investigated blacklist on the front page of the Washington Post.

How did I get on a list of “Russian Propaganda” when I never wrote about Russia or anything related to Russia?

There are two plausible possibilities. One is “guilt by association.” I’ve been interviewed by Max Keiser since 2011, and Max and his partner Stacy Herbert posted their videos on RT (Russia Today) and an Iranian media outlet. Needless to say, these sources were flagged, as was anyone associated with them. So perhaps merely having a link to an interview I did with Max and Stacy was enough to get me shadow-banned. (Shout-out to Max and Stacy in El Salvador.)

Alternatively, perhaps questioning the coronation of Queen Hillary in any way also got me on the blacklist.

Once on the blacklist, then the damage was already done, as the network of censors share blacklists without verifying the “crime”–a shadowy “crime” without any indictment, hearing or recourse, right out of Kafka.

Shadow-banning manifests in a number of ways. Readers reported that they couldn’t re-tweet any of my tweets. Another reader said the Department of Commerce wouldn’t load a page from my site, declaring it “dangerous,” perhaps with the implication that it was a platform for computer viruses and worms–laughable because there is nothing interactive on my sites and thus no potential source for viruses other than links to legitimate sources and adverts served by Investing Channel.

Users of platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have probably noticed that your feed is populated by the same “friends” or “folks you follow.” In other words, the feed you’re presented with is curated by algorithms which sort and display posts / tweets / search results according to parameters that are invisible to users and regulators.

It’s easy to send flagged accounts to Digital Siberia, and trouble-free to leave them there until the trouble-maker goes broke.

It’s impossible to chart the extent of the shadow-banning, or who’s doing it, sharing blacklists, etc. This entire ecosystem of censorship is invisible. Recall that in the Soviet gulag, having an “anti-Soviet dream” was enough to get you a tenner (10-year sentence) in the gulag. Here, posting a flagged link will get you a tenner in Digital Siberia.

When Your Own Government Confirms It Paid Censors To Silence You…

In today’s zeitgeist, merely mentioning the possibility that the COVID-19 virus escaped from a lab resulted in an instant ban in 2020. How could the possibility that it escaped from a nearby lab dedicated to viral research be labeled as “disinformation” when the facts were not yet known?

The answer is of course that the lab-escape theory was “politically sensitive” and therefore verboten.

You see the problem: what’s deemed “politically sensitive” changes with the wind, and so the boundaries of what qualifies as “misinformation” have no visible or definable edge. Virtually anything consequential can suddenly become “politically sensitive” and then declared “misinformation.” When the guidelines of what’s a “crime” and the processes of “conviction” are all opaque, and there is no hearing or recourse to being “convicted” of a shadow-“crime,” we’ve truly entered a Kafkaesque world.

How did someone like me get shadow-banned? There is no way to know, and that’s a problem for our society and our ability to solve the polycrisis we now face.

I joke that what got me shadow-banned was using Federal Reserve charts. Perhaps that’s not that far from reality.

America At War-Provoking The Consequences

By Christopher Black

Source: New Eastern Outlook

The United States of America is at war with Russia. There is not much point in using terms such as “proxy war” to describe the situation. If a belligerent in a war is acting as a proxy for another power and that power is not engaged directly in the war, the term can be useful. But when the power, for which the “proxy” engages in the war, is directly involved in the war itself, then it is a co-belligerent, a party to the war directly, not simply by proxy.

The issue is whether each state is pursuing its own interests and has its own independent means of doing so, or whether the interests and forces of the allied powers are subordinate to the interests and forces of a leader.  In such a case, the enemy being attacked can regard all its opponents as a single entity.

In this regard, Clausewitz said that, “if you can vanquish all your enemies by defeating one of them, that defeat must be the main objective of the war. In this one enemy, we strike at the centre of gravity of the entire conflict.”

If we analyse the war in the Ukraine theatre of operations in these terms, it becomes clear that the Ukrainian military forces are in fact forces of the United States of America. They have been created, armed, trained, supplied, financed, and are directed and commanded by the Americans, for American interests. The government for whom they nominally fight is a puppet state, installed in power by the United States and its NATO allies in a coup d’etat in 2014. It has no independent interests outside of American ones, and no control over the war or the forces nominally under its command.

The United States of America is the leader of a hostile military alliance, the purpose of which, since its inception, has been to isolate, threaten, attack and destroy Russia, has conspired with its alliance for years to achieve this end, has spent vast resources to prepare the attack, and has, with malice and determination, sabotaged any proposals for peace.  It insists on war.  It is the centre of gravity of the entire conflict.

The American government claims that it is not engaged even in a proxy war with Russia, that they are merely assisting an independent nation suffering aggression from another, that this does not put them at war with Russia, a war which, they claim, they are trying to avoid despite their actions and daily propaganda.

But, like the British, and the rest, the truth is the United States of America is a party to the war directly, according to all accepted criteria under international law. It supplies money to conduct the war, tanks, armoured vehicles, aircraft, arms, ammunition, military provisions and other war materials, engages its own military forces-military advisors and combatants, provides military intelligence, obtained on a real-time basis from its spy networks, satellite observations and electronic data collection, engages in an intense propaganda war against Russia, has attempted, through “sanctions,” to impose a blockade on Russia and its economy and people, blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline, sends, on a regular basis, senior government and military officials, including the American President, Congressional bigwigs and the leaders of other members of the military alliance, to meet with and direct the actions of their lieutenant Zelensky, and conducts constant military exercises further threatening attacks against Russia. The NATO Air Defender military exercises begin in Europe on June 12, the day I write this, involving hundreds of NATO aircraft.

Make no mistake. The United States of America is at war with Russia. No amount of rhetoric can hide that fact and what the consequences for the United States will be. To quote Clausewitz again,

 “Danger is part of the friction of war. Without an accurate conception of danger, we cannot understand war.”

The problem is that the neither the Americans nor the other members of its unholy alliance, seem to realise the danger they are in, neither their leaders nor their citizens. Like the British, they suffer from the delusion that they are insulated from the consequences of their war, that they are invulnerable, that Russia will not dare to respond to the attacks upon its territory and people by attacking their territories. This shared delusion makes them ever more dangerous, since they think, they can keep escalating their actions in the war without any limits.  They cannot-not without consequences.

On June 8th Tass reported, following the statement by the former head of NATO, Fogh Rasmussen, that NATO countries may send their forces into the conflict directly, that Dmitry Medvedev stated,

“Fogh Rasmussen wasn’t a very smart man before. And now he has sunk into a doctrinaire’s dementia. In an interview with The Guardian, he stated that even if Banderavite Ukraine doesn’t receive an invitation to join NATO in Vilnius, the countries of the alliance will be able to send their troops there. Sort of on their own.”

“Well, have the people of these countries been asked? Who among them wants war with Russia? Do they really want hypersonic strikes on Europe? And what does Uncle Sam think about this? It would affect him too, wouldn’t it?”

Again, on June 1, TASS reported that Dmitry Medvedev stated, in connection with the attack on Russians in the Belgorod region by NATO-Ukrainian forces,

“The aim was simple – to cause damage, to harm to the civilian population somehow, And the fact that our enemy is already behaving as a terrorist characterizes in a very specific way both the Ukrainian regime and those who are behind it – first of all the Americans and the Europeans, who, in fact, have got on the warpath with us. Terrorist acts must entail the harshest retaliation possible.”

Medvedev’s views have been stated by other members of the government, by members of the Duma and by President Putin when he referred to Russian strikes on command and decision centres wherever they may be.

The Americans can whistle in the dark, lie to their people, try to fool the world, but what matters is what the Russian government thinks and knows, and it thinks, because it knows, that the United States of America is at war with Russia and seeks Russia’s complete defeat and subjugation. The campaign in Ukraine is just a phase of this war, is the current geographical space for this war, so for the United States and its allies to assume that they can carry out attacks on Russia and not suffer being dealt with in kind or worse, that war cannot be waged on their territories, is a serious mistake.

Indeed, on May 31, Dmitry Medvedev stated with respect to Britain,

“London is, in fact, waging an undeclared war on Moscow, which means that any British official can be viewed as a legitimate military target.

“Today, Great Britain is acting as an ally of Ukraine, by providing it with equipment and personnel as military assistance, that is de facto waging an undeclared war against Russia. Therefore, any of its officials, both military and civilian ones, who are making a contribution to the war effort, can be viewed as a legitimate military target,”

Medvedev was commenting on a remark by British Foreign Secretary James Cleverly who had justified the drone attacks on Moscow, saying that Ukraine had the right to attack targets on Russian territory for self-defense.

He added,

“Foolish officials in the UK, our eternal enemy, should remember that under universally recognized international law governing the conduct of war in modern conditions, including the Hague and Geneva Conventions with their additional protocols, their situation can also be qualified as being at war.”

The same analysis applies in spades to the United States of America.

An interesting comment in this regard was made by the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov on June 3rd when, according to Tass, he stated in an interview on the Rossiya-1 TV channel, that,

“Ukraine has simply become a tool of the West’s ‘hybrid war’ against Russia, and therefore it is futile to deal with it in resolving the conflict. Now, Ukraine is actually a tool of conflict. The conflict has indeed become broader, as the collective West is waging a hybrid war against our country. It is futile to deal with this tool in order to resolve the conflict, and this must be understood too.”

All the rhetoric from NATO about whether or not Ukraine can become a member of NATO is just a smokescreen to hide from their people the fact that Ukraine is already de facto part of NATO.  Whether or not the formalities of signing pieces of paper, of getting the approval of NATO states is followed through, is irrelevant.

Remember that on March 26, 2022, in Warsaw, President Biden stated,

“We have a sacred obligation under Article 5 to defend each and every inch of NATO territory with the full force of our collective power.”

He was referring not only to Poland but to Ukraine as well. What Russia feared is now the reality. Ukraine is de facto a NATO state.  And all the rhetoric from the West and commentators about whether or not NATO will invoke Article 5 is another smokescreen designed to mask what is really happening, for NATO has already activated Article 5 of the NATO Treaty.

The talk about invoking it in the future is an attempt to hide NATO’s weakness, its defeats on the military, economic and political fronts, even as they throw one weapon system after another at Russia, and inject NATO forces into the fighting only to have their equipment and forces destroyed.

 They have nothing left to throw at Russia that can defeat it.  So, they pretend NATO is not yet really engaged. But these facts make the USA even more dangerous as it becomes clear that the combined West cannot defeat Russia, a nuclear power, using conventional means.

Remember also that the United States has a first strike nuclear arms policy, and they have already placed, in Romania and Poland, land-based versions of the Aegis Air Defence System, which can be used to launch nuclear-armed missiles at Russia. These systems have been tested.  The one in Poland is reported to be fully operational as of June 30.  The danger to Russia is immediate and existential. Those systems are one of the reasons Russia activated its military operations.  Russia has further responded to this, and to the attacks on Russia, clearly planned and ordered by the US and UK, by placing tactical nuclear weapons in Belarus which are to be made operational after July 7, when the facilities to store and use them will be completed.

Those tactical nuclear weapons are designed for battlefield use. We hope it never comes to that, but Russia faces a direct threat from people bent on its destruction that think they are untouchable. So, Russia faces very difficult choices on what to do and how to prevent an escalation to all our nuclear war while ensuring its own security.

On May 23, during his visit to Laos, Deputy Head of the Russian Security Council Dmitry Medvedev issued a warning on the day Russian security forces destroyed the Ukrainian raiding force that attacked civilians in the Belgorod region.

“The North Atlantic alliance does not take the threat of nuclear war seriously enough, thus making a big mistake. NATO is not serious about this scenario. Otherwise, NATO would not have supplied such dangerous weapons to the Ukrainian regime. Apparently, they think that a nuclear conflict, or a nuclear apocalypse, is never ever possible. NATO is wrong, and at some point, events may take a completely unpredictable turn. The responsibility will be placed squarely on the North Atlantic Alliance,”

Medvedev pointed out that no one knows whether the point of no return has been passed,

“No one knows this. This is the main danger. Because as soon as they provide something, they say: let’s supply this, too. Long-range missiles or planes. Everything will be all right. But nothing will be fine. We will be able to cope with it. But only more and more serious types of weapons will be used. That’s what the current trend is.”

So, we come back to Clausewitz. The American government and people cannot understand the war they are engaged in unless they understand the danger, they are in.  They have to understand their country is the centre of gravity in this war, whose defeat will mean the defeat of all its minions in NATO. The Russian people know the danger they are in. The Americans, through NATO, through their NATO puppets in Ukraine, have attacked Russians in Russia. It is logical to expect that Russia will decide to bring home to the Americans what war means, what danger they are in, and they do not need to use nuclear weapons to achieve this.

Russia can strike using its conventional hypersonic weapons as well, against which the USA has no defence whatsoever, as has been established with the destruction of the Patriot Air defence complexes in Ukraine which could not stop Russian missiles. They have no other air defence systems operational in the United States territory or on its naval forces that can stop them either.  Russia has not decided to take this step yet. But it can and the Americans can do nothing about it except bluster about using nuclear weapons against Russia, But Russia took that possibility into account when the special military operation began.

The American people have not directly experienced war in their own territory for a long time. They have no idea what it is. They have no idea of the danger they are in so long as their government continues its aggressive policies, not only against Russia, but China as well.  The American people, misled and misinformed, have no conception of the dangers of this war anymore than the British people and the peoples of the other NATO countries do. The American people must be warned.  The United States of America is at war, and no amount of bluffing and lying can protect them from the consequences their government is provoking. To repeat what I said in my warning to the people of Britain, the consequences are predictable and they will be catastrophic.

A Credible Explanation of How Kakhovka Dam Was Blown Up

By Eric Zuesse 

Source: Dissident Voice

Though Western ‘news’ media have gotten their ‘explanation’ of this event from Ukraine’s Government, it never made sense that Russia would have wanted to flood, harm, and weaken, the entire western half of the territory that Russia now controls in the former Ukraine, including in Crimea (which was getting its water-supply from that dam).

The anonymous author of the “Moon of Alabama” website has a long and almost flawless record of accurately exposing realities that mainstream U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media had been hiding, and the latest such is his June 13 “Did Russia Destroy The Nova Kakhovka Dam?” His report there turns upside-down and inside-out the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ that the dam had been bombed not by a missile, but by an explosive device which had been placed there by saboteurs whom Ukraine’s Government assumes were from Russia. U.S.-Government-approved ‘news’-media accept and amplify that assumption, but “MoA” does not.

First, he quotes the New York Times and other U.S. Government mouthpieces presenting the Ukrainian Government’s ‘explanation’ of the blow-up; and then he rips it apart by noting the extremely relevant (but in U.S.-and-occupied lands ignored) fact, that on May 12, Britain had supplied to Ukraine its “Storm Shadow” missiles that are designed to have a two-stage bombing-operation: first, a normal surface bomb, but then after it a fuse-ignited ground-penetrating bomb to explode deeper inside even a fortified and hardened underground target such as that dam was apparently blown up.

The British-supplied Storm Shadow weapon is perfect for this type of destruction — exploding from deep underground, instead of from the surface. And whereas Russia doesn’t have any Storm Shadows, Ukraine definitely does — ever since May 12.

The present news-report about U.S.-and-allied lies is being simultaneously submitted for publication by all of the standard U.S.-Government mouthpiece propaganda-media, just in case any of them might finally want to go beyond their standard U.S.-Government-approved sources.

Ever since at least late 2022, Russia has been warning that Ukraine’s government wants to blow up that dam. For example, on 1 November 2022, Reuters headlined “Russia announces wider evacuation of occupied southern Ukraine,” and reported that,

“Due to the possibility of the use of prohibited methods of war by the Ukrainian regime, as well as information that Kyiv is preparing a massive missile strike on the Kakhovka hydroelectric station, there is an immediate danger of the Kherson region being flooded,” Vladimir Saldo, Russian-installed head of occupied Kherson province, said in a video message.

“Given the situation, I have decided to expand the evacuation zone by 15 km from the Dnipro,” he said. “The decision will make it possible to create a layered defence in order to repel Ukrainian attacks and protect civilians.”

Moscow has accused Kyiv of planning to use a so-called “dirty bomb” to spread radiation, or to blow up a dam to flood towns and villages in Kherson province. Kyiv says accusations it would use such tactics on its own territory are absurd, but that Russia might be planning such actions itself to blame Ukraine. …

Saldo, the Russian-imposed occupation leader for the province, identified seven towns on the east bank that would now be evacuated, comprising the main populated settlements along that stretch of the river.

Even U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media occasionally report relevant facts when they find them useful to mention in a ‘news’-report that has an anti-Russian “spin.”

So: we know that Russia’s Government was trying to protect the residents in that region against this attack, but U.S.-and-allied ‘news’-media have unquestioningly accepted the Ukrainian government’s accusation that Russia’s Government did it. And, now, an extremely likely explanation has finally been provided, which implicates both Ukraine’s government and UK’s Government as having done it.

Ukraine Stays with the West But Russia Is Winning and Has the Receipts

By Margaret Kimberley

Source: Black Agenda Report

A delegation of African leaders travelled to Ukraine and Russia to help broker peace. But the collective west insists on prolonging the conflict.

The war in Ukraine grinds on and the Ukrainian army is being destroyed by Russia with great loss of life. One would think that Ukraine would be grateful for any and all peace efforts, but it is being used as a proxy by the United States and its NATO allies, the collective west. The seeds of this catastrophe began long before Russia’s special military operation. The European Union and NATO nations brought anti-Russian right-wing forces to power in 2014 in a coup against the elected Ukrainian president. If not for them there would be no war at all.

Their degree of culpability became clear recently when a delegation of African leaders traveled to Ukraine and Russia as part of a peacemaking initiative. The party included heads of state of Senegal, Egypt, Zambia, Comoros, Uganda, Republic of Congo, and South Africa. Comoros President Azali Assoumani is the current chair of the African Union. The group was greeted in Kiev by air raid sirens used to create the appearance that a Russian missile attack was underway. President Zelensky was barely polite, thanking South African president Cyril Ramaphosa and others for coming but letting them know that everything was Russia’s fault and that he had no interest whatsoever in peace talks. 

Not only is Ukraine a de facto U.S. colony which lives and dies by Washington’s whims, but it is also a deeply racist country. Much of its population is still attached to Nazi ideology and the politics of World War II collaborator Stephan Bandera. 

Nazi salutes, swastikas and other insignias are common there. So much so that the New York Times recently felt obliged to wonder in feigned innocence why these symbols are worn openly. The simple and obvious answer is that Ukraine is full of Nazis. Any likelihood that the same people would listen to Africans were indeed slim. 

Ukraine was joined in racial superiority theater by Poland. Media and security staff accompanying the presidents were delayed there and the delegation had to travel without them. When the manufactured drama was no longer needed the delegation arrived in St. Petersburg, Russia and met with president Vladimir Putin who had a surprise of his own. 

Putin listened politely to the 10-point plan and then interrupted with a surprise of his own. He not only reminded them the conflict began in 2014 but pointed out that Russia has been ready for peace ever since Turkey brokered negotiations with Ukraine in April 2022. Ukraine was on the verge of signing an agreement until its collective west friends, the US and UK in particular, scuttled the plan. 

The Treaty on Permanent Neutrality and Guarantees of Security of Ukraine offered security guarantees for Ukraine in exchange for a commitment to remain neutral, meaning that NATO membership would be off the table. Putin pointed out that as soon as Russian forces left Kiev the agreement was thrown into “the dustbin.” Just as in the case of the Minsk Agreements, the collective west offered treachery instead of peace.

The African leaders have their own self-interest which sent them to Russia. Their nations’ supplies of grain and fertilizer have been disrupted by the western sanctions and restrictions on trade with Russia. Earlier agreements on this trade have worked against Africans, as Putin pointed out, “These European neo-colonial powers, technically the US, have once again deceived the international community and the Africa countries in need: 31.7 million tonnes were exported and only three percent reached Africa’s needy countries. Is this not deception?”

It is all to the good that the international community works together to end this war, but the west is only interested in escalating and Ukraine pays the price. The collective west excels in creating propaganda and bullying its allies. The rest of the world is working to escape U.S. and NATO domination as Ukrainians die in large numbers.

Ukraine’s love of Nazi symbolism reveals why that country is content to turn its population into cannon fodder. Meanwhile western insistence on escalation brings the entire world to the brink. Yet there is still no honest discussion about how the war began, or how the Nordstream pipeline exploded. Russia is still painted as the villain and the people of this country go into another presidential election year in the dark.

Russia is not just winning on the battlefield. Nation after nation has declared an intention to use currencies other than the dollar for trade or to join the BRICS. But the collective west cannot accept defeat. The threat they represent to the world cannot be underestimated.

Neocon Warmonger Advocates Nukes to Nazis in Ukraine

Violent Russian-hating Nazis wouldn’t nuke Moscow, would they?

By Kurt Nimmo

Source: Kurt Nimmo Substack

Maybe you may remember Michael Rubin. He worked with Douglas Feith’s Office of Special Plans (OSP), a neocon pro-war outfit set-up in the Pentagon by then Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The OSP’s objective was to create a series of false pretenses to invade Iraq in 2003.

According to Karen Kwiatkowski, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel whose assignments included duties as a Pentagon desk officer, the Office of Special Plans represented a “subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-option through deceit of a large segment of the Congress.”

Rumsfeld and vice president Dick Cheney used the OSP to publicize “hot garbage” from a cast of dubious characters produced by Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress, including “Curveball” (Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, a German intelligence asset pretending to be an Iraqi chemical engineer).

The lies that killed over a million Iraqis were dismissed as “intelligence failures” and swept under the rug. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Feith, Rubin, and other neocons were never held responsible for the massive war crimes they perpetuated.

On June 9, Rubin, a “senior fellow” at the American Enterprise Institute (and former “fellow” at the Council on Foreign Relations), penned “Can Biden Deter a Russia Nuclear Attack on Ukraine? Yes, if He Gives Ukraine Tactical Nukes.

Rubin demands the nazified post-coup government of Ukraine receive nukes. Rubin believes the 1994 Budapest Memorandum (exchanging Soviet-era nukes deployed to Ukraine in exchange for sovereignty) was a monumental error. “The simple fact is this: United States maintains nuclear weapons because they are an effective deterrent against other nuclear states. Ukraine should have the same right,” Rubin writes.

Rubin and his neocon co-conspirators are not interested in “an effective deterrent” in Ukraine; they are interested in destroying the Russian state, the same as they destroyed the Iraqi state. However, Iraq, despite neocon lies, never had nuclear weapons (and the chemical weapons they did possess were supplied US corporations). Russia controls the largest arsenal of nukes in the world.

The non-proliferation mafia might howl with outrage, but the West must gear its nuclear policy toward reality, not wishful thinking or an empty façade of a treaty regimen by which revisionist states no longer abide.

Please read between the lines. According to this entitled “senior fellow,” the neocon “reality” envisions nuclear war as the most effective way to overthrow Putin and dismember the Russian Federation. Rubin, of course, does not call directly for nuclear war. However, his demand that Ukraine be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons will result in precisely that outcome. Imagine Ukraine’s Azov Battalion neo-nazis using nukes to target the Kremlin instead of hit-or-miss drones.

Rubin’s clarion call for nuclear destruction was crossposted on 19FortyFive, a “center-right” website that has produced neocon propaganda subsequently picked up by The New York Times, Newsweek, The Washington Post, The Hill, Reuters, and Voice of America (CIA propaganda), among others. It should be noted that 19FortyFive was until very recently a “regional defense publication.”

With the Ukrainian counter-offensive underway, the threat that Russia might use tactical nuclear weapons is increasingly a likelihood. It would be unfair to blame Kyiv. There is no moral equivalence. Russia invaded Ukraine; not the other way around. So long as Ukraine was on the verge of victory, Putin would arrive at this point of nuclear retaliation.

Nonsense. Zelenskyy’s “counter-offensive” has thus far failed miserably, a fact even the war propaganda media is obliged to admit. Thus, Russia does not need to use nuclear weapons. Rubin, however, is able to make his bogus claim thanks to the fiction of Russian desperation over defeat, a false narrative telegraphed daily by a mendacious and cynically fantasist corporate propaganda media.

As should be expected, Rubin completely ignores the fact Russia went into eastern Ukraine to prevent the ethnic cleansing and slaughter of ethnic Russians. For the neocons, responsible for massive war crimes in the Middle East (Iraq, Syria, Libya), human life is expendable. Disease, malnutrition, infant mortality, DU-produced cancer—these are the preferred tools for regime change and the destruction of targeted societies resistant to neoliberal serfdom.

Rubin believes the prospect of USG nukes handed over to Russian-hating neo-nazi ultranationalists in Ukraine will save the day and prevent military action “not only against Ukraine but also against Moldova and the Baltic States,” a claim that is utter BS.

Meanwhile, more rational Americans, while small in number, are increasingly concerned about the escalatory behavior of the USG, under the sway of vicious and murderous neocons, which will put an end to not only civilization but all life on planet Earth.

The BRICS Reshape the Global Geopolitical Map

By Manuel F. Diaz

Source: InfoBrics.org

Thirty years ago, pluripolarity was far from a reality in a world that had been under U.S. hegemony since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Today, however, humanity is taking important steps toward forming a plural geopolitics whose protagonists are the emerging countries that challenge Western power.

The turning point towards a new form of integration, which will generate a new world political balance, occurred in 2009 when Brazil, Russia, India, and China held the first BRIC summit.

After the incorporation of South Africa to this group in 2010, the BRICS has generated such real prospects that other nations with productive capacity and diversified economies have expressed interest in joining. Among them are Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Argentina, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico.

In the article “Can the BRICS Trump the IMF and the World Bank?,” Palestinian-American journalist Ramzy Baroud noted that “one of the biggest opportunities and challenges” the BRICS now faces is expanding its membership while maintaining its current growth.

Recent financial reports revealed that the BRICS have the world’s largest gross domestic product (GDP) and that economic bloc contributes 31.5 percent of global GDP, while the Group of Seven (G7) stuck at 30.7 percent.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank (WB) are known for providing financial support to developing countries under conditions that, under the pretext of defending human rights or democracy, seek to favor the privatization of public goods and the opening of domestic markets for Western foreign investors.

Due to these politically-driven conditionalities, the struggle for alternatives to the IMF-WB mechanisms becomes a political task. The Global South requires international institutions that are not interested in indirectly manipulating or controlling national economies.

That is the call for the BRICS to evolve towards integration schemes that go beyond the exclusively economic realm, although the basis of the fight against the U.S.-controlled institutions is the formation of an alternative economy.

Recently, the BRICS placed a capital of US$50 billion for the launch of their New Development Bank (NDB), which will be chaired by former Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff.

This happened at a time when presidents Xi Jinping (China) and Lula da Silva (Brazil) showed a shared interest in influencing the peaceful solution of the Ukrainian conflict.

Under these circumstances, to argue that the BRICS are a group with purely economic interests is to ignore much of the its history.

“The timing of the BRICS expansion, the stern political discourse of its members, potential members and allies, the repeated visits by top Russian and Chinese diplomats to Africa and other regions of the Global South, etc… indicate that the BRICS have become the new geopolitical, economic and diplomatic platform for the countries of the South,” said Baroud.

Meanwhile, the Western powers, whose economies are struggling to stay afloat, are closely and suspiciously watching the changes taking place in the Global South at the hands of the BRICS.

The Hegemon Will Go Full Hybrid War Against BRICS+

The Hybrid War 2.0 against the Global South has not even started. Swing states, you have all been warned.

By Pepe Escobar

Source: Global Research

U.S. Think Tank Land hacks are not exactly familiar with Montaigne: “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”

Hubris leads these specimens to presume their flaccid bottoms are placed high above anyone else’s. The result is that a trademark mix of arrogance and ignorance always ends up unmasking the predictability of their forecasts.

U.S. Think Tank Land – inebriated by their self-created aura of power – always telegraphs in advance what they’re up to. That was the case with Project 9/11 (“We need a new Pearl Harbor”). That was the case with the RAND report on over-extending and unbalancing Russia. And now that’s the case with the incoming

American War on BRICS as outlined by the chairman of the New York-based Eurasia Group.

It’s always painful to suffer through the intellectually shallow Think Thank Land wet dreams masquerading as “analyses” but in this particular case key Global South players need to be firmly aware of what awaits them.

Predictably, the whole “analysis” revolves around the imminent, devastating humiliation to the Hegemon and its vassals: what happens next in country 404, also known – for now – as Ukraine.

Brazil, India, Indonesia and Saudi Arabia are dismissed as “four major fence-sitters” when it comes to the U.S./NATO proxy war against Russia. It’s the same old “you’re with us or against us” trope.

But then we are presented with the six major Global South culprits: Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey.

In yet another crude, parochial remix of a catch phrase referring to the American elections, these are qualified as the key swing states the Hegemon will need to seduce, cajole, intimidate and threaten to assure its dominance of the “rules-based international order”.

Saudi Arabia and South Africa are added to a previous report focused on the “four major fence sitters”.

The swing state manifesto notes that all of them are G-20 members and “active in both geopolitics and geoeconomics” (Oh really? Now that’s some breaking news). What it does not say is that three of them are BRICS members (Brazil, India, South Africa) and the other three are serious candidates to join BRICS+: deliberations will be turbo-charged in the upcoming BRICS summit in South Africa in August.

So it’s clear what the swing state manifesto is all about: a call to arms for the American war against the BRICS.

So BRICS packs no punch

The swing state manifesto harbors wet dreams of near-shoring and friend-shoring moving away from China. Nonsense: enhanced intra-BRICS+ trade will be the order of the day from now on, especially with the expanded practice of trade in national currencies (see Brazil-China or within ASEAN), the first step towards widespread de-dollarization.

The swing states are characterized as “not a new incarnation” of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), or “other groupings dominated by the Global South, such as the G-77 and BRICS.”

Talk about exponential nonsense. This is all about BRICS+ – which now has the tools (including the NDB, the BRICS bank) to do what NAM could never accomplish during the Cold War: establish the framework of a new system bypassing Bretton Woods and the interlocking coercion mechanisms of the Hegemon.

As for stating that BRICS has not “packed much punch” that only reveals U.S. Think Tank Land’s cosmic ignorance of what BRICS + is all about.

The position of India is only considered in terms of being a Quad member – defined as a “U.S.-led effort to balance China”. Correction: contain China.

As for the “choice” of swing states of choosing between the U.S. and China on semiconductors, AI, quantum technology, 5G and biotechnology, that’s not about “choice”, but to what level they are able to sustain Hegemon pressure to demonize Chinese technology.

Pressure on Brazil, for instance, is much heavier than on Saudi Arabia or Indonesia.

In the end though, it all comes back to the Straussian neocon obsession: Ukraine. The swing states, in varying degrees, are guilty of opposing and/or undermining the sanctions dementia. Turkey, for instance, is accused of channeling “dual-use” items to Russia. Not a word on the U.S. financial system viciously forcing Turkish banks to stop accepting Russian MIR payment cards.

On the wishful thinking front, this pearl stands out among many: “The Kremlin seems to believe it can make a living by turning its trade south and east.”

Well, Russia is already making excellent living all across Eurasia and a vast expanse of the Global South.

The economy has re-started (drivers are domestic tourism, machine building and the metals industry); inflation is at only 2.5% (lower than anywhere in the EU); unemployment is at only 3.5%; and head of the Central Bank Elvira Nabiullina said that by 2024 growth will be back to pre-SMO levels.

U.S. Think Tankland is congenitally incapable of understanding that even if BRICS+ nations may still have some serious trade credit issues to iron out, Moscow has already shown how even an implied hard backing of a currency can turn out to be an instant game changer. Russia is at the same time backing not only the ruble but also the yuan.

Meanwhile, the Global South de-dollarization caravan moves on relentlessly – as much as the proxy war hyenas may keep howling in the dark. When the full – staggering – scale of NATO’s humiliation in Ukraine unfolds, arguably by mid-summer, the de-dollarization high-speed train will be fully booked, non-stop.

“Offer you can’t refuse” rides again

If all of the above was not already silly enough, the swing state manifesto doubles down on the nuclear front, accusing them of “future (nuclear) proliferation risks”: especially – who else – Iran.

By the way, Russia is defined as a “middle power, but one in decline”. And “hyper-revisionist” to boot. Oh dear: with “experts” like this, the Americans don’t even need enemies.

And yes, by now you may be excused to roar with laughter: China is accused of attempting to direct and co-opt BRICS. The “suggestion” – or “offer you can’t refuse”, Mafia-style – to the swing states is that you cannot join a “Chinese-directed, Russian-assisted body actively opposing the United States.”

The message is unmistakable: “The threat of a Sino-Russian co-optation of an expanded BRICS—and through it, of the global south—is real, and it needs to be addressed.”

And here are the recipes to address it. Invite most swing states to the G-7 (that was a miserable failure). “More high-level visits by key U.S. diplomats” (welcome to cookie distributor Vicky Nuland). And last but not least, Mafia tactics, as in a “nimbler trade strategy that begins to crack the nut of access to the U.S. market.”

The swing state manifesto could not but let the Top Cat out of the bag, predicting, rather praying that “U.S.-China tensions rise dramatically and turn into a Cold War-style confrontation.” That’s already happening – unleashed by the Hegemon.

So what would be the follow-up? The much sought after and spun-to-death “decoupling”, forcing the swing states to “align more closely with one side or the other”. It’s “you’re with us or against us” all over again.

So there you go. Raw, in the flesh – with inbuilt veiled threats. The Hybrid War 2.0 against the Global South has not even started. Swing states, you have all been warned.